Tracking Maine’s fundraising frenzy
As part of The Maine Monitor's 2026 voter guide, IRW built an interactive campaign finance tracking system that covers every competitive race in the state: the governor’s race, 35 state Senate races, 151 state House races, a federal Senate race, and two federal House districts.
The project tracks 190 races and more than 430 candidates across all five race types.
Each race page is built as a standalone, embeddable, interactive, and mobile-friendly design for The Maine Monitor's WordPress site, following their brand guidelines. Readers can explore total fundraising and spending by candidate, see breakdowns by contribution source, view top donors and expenditure recipients, and browse the FEC filing documents. The data refreshes automatically.
Here’s how we did it
We relied on three primary data sources: the Maine Campaign Finance Disclosure System for state-level candidates, the Federal Election Commission for U.S. House and Senate candidates, and the Maine Secretary of State's office for candidate certification and ballot status. In total, the system processes more than 280,000 individual transaction records, roughly 129,000 state-level transactions, and 153,000 federal receipts and expenditures.
To build the state data pipeline, we scraped the Maine Campaign Finance Disclosure System for all transaction types — contributions, expenditures, loans, debts, and independent expenditures. The disclosure site underwent a data migration during our reporting time, which introduced inconsistencies. Candidate names appeared in multiple formats, filer records were duplicated across old and new systems, and transaction counts would shift as data was moved. We cleaned the data of all these inconsistencies.
One of the more complex challenges was handling candidates running under the Maine Clean Election Act, the state's voluntary public financing program. MCEA candidates operate on an entirely different funding model: They collect small qualifying contributions as seed money, then receive a set amount of public funds from the state once they’re certified. This means their campaign finance data looks different from that of traditionally financed candidates. Some show only a few hundred dollars in seed money, while others show nothing at all if they have not yet reported campaign finance information.
We determined each candidate's finance type by cross-referencing the disclosure site's filer records with the Secretary of State's filing list, then resolved cases in which candidates had both public financing and traditional committees from prior elections. We then labeled MCEA candidates with green badges so readers would understand why some candidates appear to have raised very little. The public-financing certification deadline falls on May 21, after which we will update the data to reflect which candidates qualified for public funding.
On the federal side, we pulled from two layers of Federal Election Commission data: official committee financial summaries for aggregate totals, and itemized filings for individual donor and expenditure details. These come on different reporting schedules and use different itemization thresholds. So we maintain separate pipelines. We have a daily pull for totals and a weekly full scan for line-item records — and explain the discrepancies to readers in the page footnotes.
Aarushi Sahejpal is the data editor for the Investigative Reporting Workshop, where he spearheads our data-driven projects and supports emerging reporters. In the classroom, he is a professorial lecturer in artificial intelligence and data science at AU’s Kogod School of Business. He and Hannah Bensen, a reporter at Embarcadero Media and a former IRW Dow Jones Data Fellow, built the interactive voters’ guide for The Monitor, a nonprofit newsroom and IRW collaborator for the last six years. They worked closely with George Harvey, The Monitor's digital editor, who led the project.
